No Angels: my chemo team

 I've always hated the pat description of nurses as 'angels', and I suspect many nurses do too. It is used often in popular British newspaper headlines ( for US readers, what we call 'redtops' over here) as a direct reference to nurses. It was the name of a UK TV drama in the 80s, set in a hospital. 

But the implication seems to be that these otherworldly beings (who you see when you are close to death perhaps) are doing their good work out of a higher spiritual calling, like an 'Angel of mercy'. You wouldn't do it for other jobs. you wouldn't call the airline pilot a 'guardian' or 'pathfinder' or other dramatic title, so why pick out nurses?

The nurses who look after me every week on the Woolverstone unit are great. They work well as a team, explain everything to you, and make sure that the atmosphere in the lovely new unit is positive and supportive, while also making super-certain that you get the right toxic poison and not the wrong one. Cheerful professionalism is the order of the day.

I have a very light form of chemo, but some people are in for up to four hours, with multiple drips and blood units, and cold caps to reduce hair loss. So it's a serious business for most, and it's good to control the mood as the nursing team do. And sometimes, especially on the first appointment, it is emotionally overwhelming for some patients, perhaps because it is confirmation that yes they do have cancer. There are tears to quench.

And it just feels to me that the description of 'angels' makes us not understand what nurses do and what makes them choose the work. They do like working with and helping people. (If you didn't you'd get a job in pathology - old doctor joke). They also know that to do their job properly there is a lot of learning and practical experience that they need. A good nurse on a ward will often be the first person who notices a change in a patient and makes sure the medical team know and respond. And they are dealing, in this country at least, with a level of understaffing that makes it hard to do your job in the way that you should. And they have to negotiate that without losing sight of the potentially scared patients in their charge.

I am much more admiring of nurses than angels. Ambrosia, trumpets and halos sounds piss-easy to me compared to a nurse's job. And the non-angels of Woolverstone are doing their damnedest to deliver me to the transplant team in as good a nick as possible.